The Young Scientists Club (YSC) was just recently founded by Kim Joana Westerich und Lara Marie Siebert-Kuss for PhD, medical and master students of our CRU and associates. Besides aiming at connecting with each other, the YSC wants to strengthen the visibility of young researchers in- and outside of the CRU. To this end, the YSC offers networking events in a casual environment to allow students to get to know each other, connect and exchange on a regular basis.
Stay tuned on our up-coming events and get-togethers at our website. If you don’t want to miss an event, feel free to contact Kim Joana Westerich or Lara Marie Siebert-Kuss and they will add you to the YSC mailing-list.
Training Programme of the CRU326
The CRU326 is committed to offer skills to their members necessary to conduct research projects at the highest level. Following this concept, we will establish an advanced training programme available to all CRU326 members and associates.
As a first step we succeeded to exclusively allocate three slots for participation for the seminar 'Biomedical Informatics: Practical programming for clinicians and biologists' organised by the IMI and held by Dr. Sarah Sandmann-Varghese. A certificate will be given to all participants. To register, please contact sarah.sandmann@uni-muenster.de. Registration is open until March 30, 2022. For further information click here.
Clinical Research Unit 326 featuring 'European Fertility Week' 2022
From November 7-13, the CRU326 participated in Fertility Europe’s 'European Fertility Week' by launching a Twitter campaign to raise awareness about infertility. Over the course of one week, we published eight tweets presenting a fact related to questions of infertility and reproduction. CRU326 and Reproduction.MS PIs as well as Kim Westerich as representative of the Young Scientists Club (YSC) provided the scientific input. The messages focused on male fertility and ageing, possible causes for unsuccessful medically assisted reproduction, or the interrelationship between infertility and comorbidities, among others.
A big thank-you to all CRU326 and Reproduction.MS researchers who supported the campaign! We’re already looking forward to next year’s European Fertility Week! We’ll definitely be on board!
We established three special consultation hours for 'Unexplained Male Infertility' (CeRA), 'PCD and Infertility' (DGP), and 'Reproductive Genetics' (IHG) within the highly interconnected setting of this clinical research unit.
Furthermore, a multidisciplinary case conference with the three clinical partners of the CRU326 - CeRA, Paediatrics, and Genetics - and involving basic scientists was implemented. In these bi-monthly meetings, more than 120 patients were discussed of whom 38 were followed-up in detail because of distinct phenotypes. Remarkably, a genetic diagnosis could be assigned to almost 50% of these patients (18/38), partially in previously unknown genes.
Enable data and sample exchange across institutions
We belong to the first who joined the Medical Faculty Münster's biobank initiative and allocated a central storage fulfilling all regulations. Currently >24.000 DNA, >5.000 semen and >3.000 testicular samples are available, resembling one of the largest repositories worldwide.
Connect researchers - even beyond the CRU326
Central, the philosophy of the CRU326 is to foster interactions with external reseachers and interested people across the reproductive field and beyond.
A one-day CRU326 symposium 'Reproduction and beyond' in combination with the 10th anniversary of the CeRA in 2018 was broadly attended, aiming to impart our research propositions to the public. In 2019, a 2-day 'Network Reproduction' meeting was held with >70 researchers working on both the female and male side. For 2020, several CRU326 group leaders co-organise the major 2020 event in 'Andrology' – an unprecedented conference combining meetings of the national, european and international andrological societies.
Complementary public relations comprise the establishment of our very own website (male-germ-cells.de), a ResearchGate profile, a Twitter account (@MaleGermCells), and public video outlets on Instagram or other channels (UKM), facilitating an open and transparent handling of our research.
In ordner to spread the topic of male infertility also with the broader public, we contributed to a number of open-access articles, including content for the UKM magazine PulsSCHLAG (2017 / 2019) or the DFG's journal 'forschung' (2019).
